I
slept well last night, cozy and warm in the silence and pure darkness.
For breakfast I had hot coffee and sweet bread, sitting in the sun. But
I feel hungover, tired, used and abused.

I
feel like my body has been handled by fat, clammy male hands, my throat
stings from stale cigarette smoke, and I smell flat, warm beer. I have
just read through Boystown.

Cheap bodies,
cheap clothes, cheap beer, cheap smokes, cheap sex, cheap love. None of
it questioned, all of it accepted at its falsified face value. The men
and women (and occasional children) in these 1970s anonymous brothel-town
souvenir snapshots never considered that their image might end up in an
art-photo book in post-modern, post-feminist times.

Perhaps
the power of these photographs lies in the fundamental fact that no myths
are being created or sustained, writes photographer Keith Carter
in his essay at the back of the book. There is nowhere to hide anything
and no one cares to anyway; theyve come here to La Zona de Tolerancia
(The Zone of Indulgence) to do the very opposite. This tempts poetic conclusions
about these photographs expression of basic human needs and desires,
and the ways and places weve created to fulfill them; conclusions
about the universality of lust and its satisfaction among all men and
among all women (though functioning very differently between the genders);
about the fact that prostitution in its many forms has never been absent
from the human experience; about how beauty transcends, can be found in
anywhere; and the specific aesthetic and fantastic allure of a risky,
underground lifestyle.

For me, this
book is about the women. While it is the men who are making the moves
(kissing, grabbing, fondling, and most often holding on possessively),
the men who have come here from many desert miles away, the men who are
looking for and paying for a service, in these photographs they are one-dimensional
characters. They are obvious and pitiful. The women, conversely, are extremely
present, both for the camera and apparently to themselves as well. My
experience of this was similar to that of Carter: On first viewing,
I thought the women looked understandably detached. After a longer look
it seems to me that they are detached, but only from their male companions;
they are fully present to the photographer. The men look pitiable
because they are so glaringly unaware that the inhabitant of the body
they cling to is in another world; not far away, not dreamy nor in denial,
but not partaking in their fantasy--just playing the game as far as the
little change purse that lies on most of the beer bottle-laden tables
which foreground a majority of the images. Many of the womens gazes
could be a wink to the photographer, and to us, can you believe
this guy?

Their facial
expressions and body language have shockingly little to do with the physical
moment. Even when they do strike a sexy pose, it is often
with such lack of enthusiasm that it hardly seems it would satisfy the
customer. None of the photos in Boystown are sexy, really. There
is no pleasure, no sensualitya hand holds a breast but there is
no visible sensation, and no interaction. Although sex itself is absent
from these photographs, you would never mistake one of these couples to
be sitting in a roadside dinerrevealed is a complex farce of romance
and companionship, and exploitation and need.

One of the
early spreads in the book is a series of portraits of prostitutes in a
photographers studio (that is, posed in front of a ratty curtain
or bare wall, alone and straight on).

Here the
women are far from interchangeable (although Cristina Pacheco writes in
her essay that they serve as, if not feel themselves to be, all
the women and none). Some are heartbreakingly worn down, a few are
coy or expressive of their sensuality, one laughs openly, another smiles
with the most kind and honest face you could find anywhere. There is a
middle-aged woman in a blond wig that only serves to make her look awkward.
Some women look like battered wives, used rags, abused girls. Some wear
so much eye make-up that the rest of their face becomes invisible. Some
look masculine, some are fat, some are having fun, some are beautiful.

You cant
help but wonder where they live, what they think about. You cant
help but wonder how integral our physical experiences are to our spirit.
Is it possible to overcome this hard physical life or, although you maintain
your distance and your memories, does it define you? Do so many of the
women in these photographs look uncomfortable for the impossible expectation
of a glamorous pose in the farthest place on Earth from Hollywood? Is
it the itchy plastic get-up they have squeezed themselves into? Is it
the camera, hired by the client, capturing them in a two-dollar
universe? Or is it perhaps their very life that makes them uneasy
in their own skin?

The photographers
who circulated in these whorehouses and the women who worked there probably
saw each other night after night; there is no artifice between them, even
in this setting that begs it. In some of the images there seems to be
a tenderness or a familiarity between the client and the prostitute, and
I let myself imagine that they have a deeper relationship. But despite
these aspects that let those depicted exist as individuals, after pages
and pages of drunk-man-grappling-half-naked-woman shots, they start to
look the same. On the very page where I felt I couldnt take it anymore,
having reached some level of tedium or surfeit, the nature of the photographs
changed. A woman with a bandaged head lies in her bed, alone. In another
children overflow the laps of what could be a young mother and her own
mom. Interestingly, here the womens gazes are shrouded; not cold,
but not inviting. This is their private world and they have no reason
to let us in.

Bill Wittliff,
the collector of these anonymous images, comments that there are more:
along with the standard party pictures there were portraits of the
prostitutes, snaps of street urchins, busboys, musiciansindeed a
cross-section of that whole cloistered world.... As a historical
or sociological study this book would be more complete if the rest of
the town, and more of the private lives of the sex workers,
were revealed. We are now so used to the tell-all, show-all manner of
investigating the other side that the book in fact seems strangely
trapped within the walls of the brothels. This collection of photographs
thereby becomes a challenge to the reader. If you are willing to take
on what they show, and still try to understand what they dont, this
is a powerful book. The essays allude to the rest of the place, and to
the stories of the characters, but the photographs force us to understand
the defining factor: the night. And yet, in that context, ... the
humanity we see in these faces seems to compel us to look squarely at
whatever uncomfortable truth lies beyond (Carter).

If I had
read Keith Carters description of Boystown the place before
looking at the photographs, the business and the lives depicted would
have been clearer cut, and more horrible. Before I really understood what
kind of place this was, and only knew that it was a cluster of brothels
on the Mexico side of the Texas-Mexico border, I could imagine life stories
for the women, ponder US-Mexico cultural dynamics, even enjoy the beautiful
reproduction of these salvaged photographs. Carters description,
though, is chilling. It was surrounded by high adobe and cinderblock
walls topped with razor-wire and broken glass.... At the lower end of
the scale were the cellsalong walls of repeated doors and windowsand
sitting outside of every one a prostitute, each one older, uglier than
the one before her. Heavier on the bitter than the sweet, even as
these photographs are of a world that revolved around what is love and
sacrifice, they are witness to the harm we do in our desperate search
to dull the pain of being.